Quote:
Originally Posted by TSGracchus
Not necessarily a 30-year window, and we aren't talking about the coal industry going bankrupt overnight, either. If the cap-and-trade system means no new coal plants can be built, that won't destroy the coal industry, it will simply limit its growth. New plants can be built NOW using existing technology to generate solar or wind power. There's no reason not to do that, instead of building new coal-fired plants, to meet new energy demand.
Whatever the window of time is for a complete overhaul of our energy economy, the same timeline exists for the phase-out and obsolescence of the coal industry. The one won't happen before the other does.
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Won't the carbon credits put pressure on all forms of fossil fuel for electricity? I'd think so.
I doubt that this carbon tax will lead to the demise of the coal industry. It certainly will make it more expensive to build a coal/oil/gas fired electricity plant (which is what Obama said would be bankrupted not the coal industry); and this will make it easier for alternative forms of energy to compete.
One thing that we might get out of this is that we will see more gasification/liquefaction of coal as a replacement for imported oil. Thing is, I don't know that Western coal (e.g. from Wyoming) is suitable for this type of conversion.
I think that the clean coal technology might not be that far from being practical. There was a recent article (IEEE Spectrum or Scientific American?) that talked about this technology and its development. It would seem to me that this technology could be applied to any plant that burned fossil fuel but it might require special geologic conditions for the plant. It is something that we should probably work to develop and if carbon tax will provide incentives for the development of the technology, bring on the carbon tax.
I sure wish we (America) didn't have so many really hard problems to deal with at once.